A Fix For: App Store Keeps Wanting To Update Apps

Apple's tech support provided me with a solution to this problem, so I thought I'd post it here for anyone else who comes across this issue. Especially since it took a call back from Apple to provide the solution.

The App Store application kept listing apps that needed updating, even thought they were in fact up to date.

Inside the application itself you could see the version number was correct and up to date.

Using Get Info from the Finder level would also produce the correct, up to date version of the application.

However, the App Store application kept showing each app's status as needing updating.

If you updated the app, the process seemed to work fine. When it finished, it would show the grayed out installed status. The apps needing updating count would drop by one. However, if you quit the App Store app, it would forget the fact that you just updated the app. When you opened up the App Store, it would list the same as you just updated as needing updating.

As more apps released updates, this list of apps in the App Store would grow.

The fix for this issue involves Spotlight.

I had a cloned my boot drive onto a partition in my Mac Pro. So, there were two copies of an OS X Applications folder. One in my boot drive, another in the cloned copy of the boot drive. Spotlight was indexing both drives. If you searched for an application, Spotlight would produce two results, one for each location.

As it turns out, this confuses the App Store, since the App Store is using Spotlight to find the apps on your system and determine if they need updating. The App Store will update the apps on your boot drive, but not the apps in the cloned copy of the boot drive. So every time you launched the App Store, it would tell you that you needed to update your apps, since there are in fact out of date (older versions) of the apps on a volume somewhere within your system.

The solution:

Remove any volumes (drives/clones/etc) that contain applications from Spotlight's list of locations to avoid searching.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy (then add the locations that contain any copies of your applications)

Once this setting was changed, the App Store worked fine.

In discussing this with Apple's tech support person, we agreed that this was an issue with the App Store and not Spotlight. You should be able to allow Spotlight to search/index any locations you want, without confusing the App Store. The App Store should be able to either ignore any applications that reside outside of the Application Folder of the boot volume/drive. Or, it should give you the option to upgrade any applications that reside anywhere in your system.

The App Store should not just get confused and keep telling you the apps you are using need updating when they not only don't need updating, since the App Store has already updated them.

I have submitted a bug report to Apple for this issue.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html